When The Debut: Dream Academy premiered last summer, the world was introduced to 20 pop star hopefuls from around the globe fighting for a spot in what would eventually become KATSEYE. However, rather than your usual survival show, where you get a peek at the contestants' dynamics with supporting everyday montages, the show was solely focused on performances, with viewers voting for their favorites to make it to the top 15, the top 10, and eventually the top six that ended in the group. Except for the chosen ones, the world largely forgot about the 14 other participants — until Netflix premiered its accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary, Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, this past August.
If you only watched The Debut: Dream Academy, Adéla Jergová might have flown under the radar. After all, she was part of the first pair to be eliminated, having only shown her skills to the world with a dance cover of BLACKPINK's "Pink Venom" during the show's first mission. "Crazyyyy [that] they eliminated Adéla after this," a comment under the video reads now. "Her getting eliminated after this is a crime," a second one echoes.
"I was heartbroken when I got let go of, but I wasn't shattered to my core," Adéla tells Teen Vogue from her Los Angeles house more than one year after her elimination. “Months before I got eliminated, I just knew deep down [that it was] not the place for me. When it's not right… It's like a relationship. When you know, you know.”
If you tuned into Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, you will surely be more familiar with Adéla and her story. She was featured heavily in the first five episodes of the show, where we got to see her make the trek from Slovakia to L.A. to train, form bonds with the other girls, and consistently rank among the top — at least until the show became a fan-voted competition.
"When I first got in, I was like, 'Finally, something where my nationality, the fact that I'm from a small country, is not going to hinder me,'" Adéla recalls. "The way that it was presented to me was all based on work ethic. It was all based on the scores you get at the end of the month, and then it just got switched, so I think that was a moment where I was like, 'Well, if I knew this, maybe I wouldn't have spent two years here.' You know what I mean? But I'm glad they didn't because maybe then I wouldn't be here."
The switch from the T&D scores to the fan voting shocked not only Adéla but also her fellow participants and viewers at home unfamiliar with The Debut: Dream Academy. It was also the center of much online drama and speculation, which Adéla does not shy away from discussing.
"There was so much weird internet drama," Adéla admits. “It was very interesting [to see] how the people were so into pitting women against each other when it wasn't like that at all. We were all kind of confused. We all checked up on each other and we were like, 'Are you okay? I don't know why they're saying that we hate each other when we're texting right now. People were really into this narrative of, 'Oh, these women each other.' Instead of, 'Oh, these women had a professional issue with each other, and they probably worked it out because they're human and they're not just [screaming] I hate you when you do something wrong. A lot of the attention was put on that drama instead of, to me, the cooler things, which was, 'Look at how much work these young women put into this.'"
Ultimately, the drama only made the bond between the contestants deeper, Adéla says. “Because we were like, 'What the f*ck is happening out there?' I mean, let me speak for myself because I don't know how everybody is feeling, but, if I had an issue with somebody, trust and believe that it's been resolved and it was never personal. It was always just a professional relationship. I think that's like basically having an issue with your coworker and then talking it out. It's really not that deep.”
Though the drama exacerbated it a year later, the girls got their first taste of internet trolls while participating in the program — but Adéla never let it phase her. "Coming from the ballet space, I grew up in a very tough training environment. Literally, like, old Russian women from the USSR smoking cigarettes in the ballet room being like, 'You're fat,'" she says. “These people are anonymous. I've had actual, real-life people in my face being so mean to me since I was 11. Personally, I've always had to have thick skin. I don't necessarily care because, also, I just know that everything is good behind the scenes.”
Seeing as audiences only got to get a taste of her personality a year after her actual elimination happened, it's only natural to wonder if results would have been different had the girls' dynamic been shown while voting was still open. But Adéla does not like to dwell on what-ifs. "Getting eliminated right away was probably for the better because I wasn't supposed to be in the group, so getting out of it as soon as I could was beneficial because it gave me like that much more time to [figure out] my thing. Who knows? If I didn't get kicked out right away, 'Homewrecked' might not have not happened."
"Homewrecked" is Adéla's debut solo single, which arrived in September. The song, which mixes the lyricism of SZA's "Kill Bill" with Marina's sonic sensibilities, is already garnering major attention. Just last week, Adéla announced it had reached a million streams on Spotify in less than a month, some from the likes of Grimes, who has been camping out in Adéla's comment section.
The song was written and composed by Adéla alongside Liam Benayon and features choreography by fellow Dream Academy contestant Emily. "We're literally like sisters," Adéla says. "Anytime she needs help, anytime I need help, we all have each other's backs. She is also the most insane dancer I know, so I was like, 'First of all, you need to be in this. And second of all, you need to choreograph this.' And she was like, 'I agree.'"
Emily and Adéla joined forces for a dance performance video and an artsy visualizer whose preview thumbnail sees Emily and Adéla in a very Maddie Ziegler-for-Sia-esque ensemble and pose. Adéla can't help but laugh at the comparison. One of her followers also pointed out the similarity a few days ago, and now she can't unsee. But will Emily become her own choreo muse? "I don't want to answer for her, but hopefully. Maybe if you put this in, she's going to be like, 'Well, f*ck, it's in Teen Vogue, so I have to," Adéla says in between laughs before her facial expressions get stern. “I mean, I would love it. I think she's the best person ever, but she has so much cool stuff going on in her life, so I would never want to take away from her stuff. But I'm like, whenever you're available though, come to me.”
"Homewrecked" might look like Adéla at its most confident — and it is — but the journey to getting there was not a straight line. She wrote the song during a writer's camp in June, where she actually met Benayon.
"It took me a year to meet the right collaborators and find out what my sound, what the visual world should be, and what the vibe should be like," she recalls. "I was making, like, indie rock music when I first got off the show, and it was not giving. That was my emo phase, I think." She quickly backtracks. "Nothing against rock music — like, people who do it well, love it. I was not one of them."
"That year f*cking sucked. It was terrible," Adéla continues. “I think before the show, I had a very clear idea of who I was [but] a program like that really took my essence out of me. I do not want to make it sound bad, because it's needed for a group. Like, [a group] needs to be one unit. It gave me so much, and I am so grateful for it. But there is this thing that's so important to me, which is being authentic, that a place like that just didn't have space for. So, after doing that for two years, when I got out, I felt so lost, and I was like, 'What the f*ck am I doing?'”
It also did not help that she had to go back to school to graduate high school during that year. "I got my GED and I was like, 'Should I just go back to school? I don't know if this is going to happen for me.' But never would I actually give up. There are always doubts in your brain, but if you love it, you're not actually going to do it. You're going to b*tch and moan about it for a little bit. But I would never actually give up."
Despite all the reservations, when she finally found "her people," the rest just flowed. “I came to the session with the chords and lyric ideas, and then [Liam Benayon and I] just wrote the song in one day and cut the vocals. Then I did the visuals, like the whole entire creative direction, all myself. I knew that coming up to the show's release, I wanted to have it ready. I didn't know that I was going to be featured so heavily at all. But I knew that it was going to give me a sliver of attention somehow, like how it gave to all the girls because you're literally on Netflix, like, duh, no-brainer. You're going to have more eyes on you than ever before. But there were no questions about it, so I was going to put it out anyway, whether it was just me and my mom bumping this or way more people than that. It just serendipitously worked out with the show coming out.”
With "Homewrecked," Adéla hopes to be her "own version of a pop star." The track is the first of a slew of songs in her upcoming debut project, which she refers to as "a concept EP where every new song is a different chapter for the character."
"This first chapter is about my home life," she says. “It's about what I went through as a person. It shows you that there was some trauma there and some things that happened that maybe explain why this character is going to be the way that she is.”
"Thematically, it also made sense because it's about killing a mistress. And I have to say, I am the number one feminist. I'm never, like, blame the woman. But it's not about killing the woman just to kill the woman. I'm addressing the man in question the entire time. It's hurting him through her," she continues. "But it's also coming from an immature place, and I think people are taking it too literally. I'm writing this from the point of view of me as a 15-year-old. It's about dealing with infidelity in the family setting as a kid and [about] how hurt you feel and how much it affects you. So of course, I'm not going to be thinking about it maturely. And obviously, it's dramatized to the max."
The next chapter, coming out this month, will be "Superscar," and Adéla already can't wait. "It's my favorite song that I've written so far. And I hate it when people say that but I, like, get it now?" Adéla gushes. "I don't want to spoil the plot of it yet, but it's definitely the next chapter for the character to be like, 'Oh f*ck, I just killed this b*tch. I have to leave now.' And you're going to see the dance performance. She's a performer. She wants to make it in the entertainment industry, which is kind of similar to what happened to me, you know what I mean."
"Everything is just very interconnected," Adéla adds. “All the stories that are going to be told through that character's point of view, they're based on real things but they're also going to be dramatized and made interesting. Like a story version. It's almost MaXXXine-esque.”
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Much like her creative direction, Adéla's priorities have also shifted a lot in the past year. She's about to turn 21 and only just now finding her place to grow roots. She first moved out of Slovakia at 14 to join the Vienna State Opera Ballet Academy. At 15, she auditioned for the English National Ballet School and moved to London for a bit. And at 19, it was L.A. for Dream Academy. After her elimination, Adéla came back to Slovakia to see her family for the first time in over a year, but then, Lalaland called again.
"I knew I wanted to do music, and this is the place to do music," she says. "I knew I was going to stay right after the show stopped. I was just like, 'What? This is my home now. I can't go anywhere else if I want to do music. There are so many creatives here, I can't do it anywhere else. I mean, you can, but this is just the perfect place for it."
Still, part of her is somewhere else. "Home to me is where my family is, so that would be Slovakia," she says. Also, adapting to the City of Angels was definitely a process. “When I first got to L.A., I was like, 'This city kind of sucks.' I was like, 'You guys really live here?' I was stuck in this bubble for so long. I didn't know what the city was like. Everything is so spread apart, and finding your people is very hard. But I feel like if I didn't stay here for the past year, my solo music wouldn't really be happening.”
Thankfully, she's also found her people there, which include her partner, her executive producer and co-writer Liam Benayon, as well as Emily, Lara, and Megan from Dream Academy and KATSEYE. "They are my three closest friends ever. Like, we just hung out yesterday. I know that whenever we have anything, we just reach out to each other, and we're always there. We understand each other so well because the thing that we went through nobody else really has," she says. "We love to go see the views. So just, like, get in the car and just talk and get food."
Their go-to? In-N-Out, of course. "I tried this new order on TikTok," Adéla gushes, unable to hide her enthusiasm and instinctively looking for her phone to no avail. “It was really good but just, like, a lot of food. I literally went up to the cashier, and I showed him the TikTok. It was like a 3x2, animal style, both grilled and raw onions. I don't even know what it was, but it was f*cking great. And then we always get animal-style fries. And then a Coke. Emily likes Dr. Pepper, which I hate, but she gets that.”
One takeout at a time, Adéla has grown to love L.A. and grapple with the notion that her heart has space for more than one place. “So many people that I love live here because I spent such formative years of my life here. The relationships that I have here are the most important ones in my life, so this feels like home now, as well as Slovakia, because there's a split; the people I love are in both places.”
For the time being, Adéla will continue to grow roots in L.A. not just because of her blossoming music career but because she's actually enrolled in college there studying music. "I don't know if it's going to be a straightforward route where it's four years and done because the number of classes that I'm taking right now are f*cking crazy, and the music has really taken off, but I really want to get [this degree]," she says.
And if this piece has taught you anything about her, it is that everything is part of a larger plan. She says she's like to eventually have her own artist development company: “What I really enjoyed during the program was helping the girls and seeing people that want to do it progress. That was so satisfying to me.”
“I want to focus on building the individual artistry of each person. I don't think that doesn't necessarily happen much anymore these days," she continues. "I feel like independent artists have to do that on their own and it's easier for people from the U.S. or maybe the U.K., where music is a thing and you have access to resources. But I know that when I was in Slovakia and I wanted to do this so badly, it felt unreachable because of just the country that [I was] in. And I'm already a privileged white person feeling like this, so I can't imagine the minority groups of people in small countries that are so talented and feel like they can't reach or make it. I even talked about it with Megan, Emily, and Lara, and they were like, 'I definitely, through my friendship with you, gained an appreciation for being American.' Just because they could follow their dreams so much [easily.]”
Mid-conversation, Adéla is already picturing herself in that future. "I think it'd be super satisfying to me to bring it back to the start," she says before shaking her head and bringing herself back to the present. "I mean, this is the future, like this is going to be when I'm old as hell, and I literally cannot stand on that stage," she says, almost as if giving herself a pep talk. “I am for sure going to make it happen, but first we need to do the pop star thing because that's [what's] going to give me credibility. Like, people are going to actually want to come to my school. If I open a school now, they'd be like, 'Who is this flop?'”
